How to create WooCommerce customer notes

WooCommerce offers a default option to add notes to orders, which can be useful when you want to include specific information related to the order. But what if you want to add a note about the customer? In this article you will learn how to add WooCommerce Customer Notes to your shop as well as how to share these notes with your team.

 

What can you do with customer notes?

There are many cases when adding a customer note to your WooCommerce plugin can be a useful thing. Here are some of the situations when WooCommerce customer notes can be useful:

• Share critical customer information with your team like order number or custom order status,
• Remember an important order detail about a customer like info to include in the invoice or customer order email
• Shop Manager can notify staff about an upset customer in private note.
• Reminder to send a discount coupon to a customer.
• Capture knowledge about customer data and WooCommerce customer history.
• Avoid errors from your team.
• Improve customer services.

 

Thanks to the User Notes feature of User Insights and the WooCommerce module you can now add and share WooCommerce customer notes with your team. In this article we are going to see how to use the customer notes functionality to capture customer related info, as well as share some tips about how to improve your WooCommerce customer management and organization.

Please note that since Users Insights works with registered WordPress users only, this feature will work only for your WooCommerce customers that have a registered WordPress account.

 

Getting Started

Where can you find the customer notes?

The first thing to do, once you install and activate Users Insights, is open the Users Insights plugin page in your WordPress dashboard and find a customer that you’d like to add a customer note to. You can do this either by just browsing through the WooCommerce customer list in the table of Users Insights, or you can use the Users Insights smart filters to search for a particular customer.

Once you have located your customer from the list, go ahead and click on the customer’s username. This will open the user profile page of Users Insights. This is a page where you have all the information about a particular customer that Users Insights has detected. This includes the default WordPress user data, WooCommerce billing data (country, city and region) and the WooCommerce activity (such as orders, reviews and coupons used).

On the right side of the user profile page you will find the User Notes section. This is where you can see all the notes for the customer as well as add new ones.

Adding a WooCommerce customer note

For this example, our customer has two existing notes and we are going to go ahead and add a new one. Once we write the note in the customer note field and press the “Add Note” button, the new note will be added to the list of customer notes.

 

 

The note will also include some info about its author and the date of its creation. The notes will be ordered in a chronological order, showing the newest notes on top. Each of the notes can be also deleted in case it is not relevant anymore. All customers notes are private, meaning thay are only available in the WordPress admin dashboard and are intended to be used for internal communication with your team members. They can be notes about shipping specifics, notes about details about the product that the customer has ordered, or sharing some specific information about the particular customer like: customer feedback, known customer preferences, notes about past communication with the customer etc.

Is the customer note ever visible to the user?

The customer note is not visible to the user, these are private customer notes and can only be seen by WordPress admins with the appropriate user roles and permissions.

Showing the number of customer notes

The user table of the Users Insights plugin also has a notes column where it shows the number of notes that every customer has. If you can’t see the “Notes” row in the table you might need to show it by clicking on the “eye” icon.

Clicking on the title of the “Notes” column will also sort the user table by the number of customer notes they have. This can be a useful feature if you want to find all the customers with the most or least notes added.

 

Filtering your customers by number of notes

The “Number of Notes” filter allows you to filter your WooCommerce customers by the number of customer notes they have. By setting the “Notes is greater than 0” filter you can quickly see which customers have notes attached to their profile:

The available options from the number of notes filter are:

• Number of notes is X.
• Number of notes is greater than X.
• Number of notes is less than X.

Here is a short video showing how to use the User Notes feature of Users Insights. In the video you can see how to add and remove User Notes, as well as how to filter your users by the number of notes:

 

 

 

Showing Only the Most Recent WooCommerce customer notes

The free extension for Users Insights Extended CRM for Users Insights includes an option to show the date of last note for each customer in the user table. This can be a handy feature because it allows you to sort your customers by this field and have an ordered list of your WooCommerce customers with the most recently added notes on the top. In this way you can always know if a new customer note has been added recently by someone from your team.

Additionally, the Last Note Date field is available in the filters, so you can segment your customers by this field. For example, you can apply a filter like “Last note date is 30 days ago”.

 

Searching customers by their notes content

Another feature that the Extended CRM for Users Insights addon provides is searching users by their note content. It is available as a filter, called “Note content”. Additionally, since the Users Insights filters are stackable, you can easily apply additional filters. For example, the following screenshot illustrates finding all customers who have a note containing the “feedback” text. We have also added another filter to further reduce the customer list to the ones who have ordered a specific product:

If  this is a filter combination that you find yourself running often, thank you can automate the process by creating a customer segment. Segments are way of having multiple filter applied at once that are automatically updated as the data change, so every time you have a new customer with feedback note that has ordered that specific product, the customer will be automatically added to the customer list:

Creating sticky customer notes

The Extended CRM for Users Insights extension also adds is the ability to add a sticky note. Making a note sticky will make the particular note always stay on top in the customer notes list.

 

 

This can be very helpful if you want an important note to be easy to notice. The sticky notes are in a different color so they can be different from the regular notes.

Showing WooCommerce Order Notes in the User Profile

WooCommerce itself has a similar feature, the order notes. But the order notes are tied to the orders, as opposed to the customer. The WooCommerce purchase notes are useful for adding order-related information, with the same goals that the user notes have.

By default, you can only see this information on the order page, and you can’t see it anywhere else:

 

 

How to add customer notes to order from WooCommerce?

But it’s possible to add WooCommerce order notes to the Users Insights user profile page. In order to include these WooCommerce custom notes to the customer profile, you’ll need to use the Extended WooCommerce Customer Management for Users Insights plugin.

With this extension of the notes plugin you can not only read all your customer notes but also all of your customer’s order notes in a single place. This may be handy if you use the order note as a way to communicate with your team.

Here is an example of the WooCommerce notes loaded in your customer’s profile:

 

The WooCommerce purchase notes, when viewed in the user profile, can be very helpful for organization. You can see which orders have issues, which customers have changed their mind over time or how your team has dealt with difficult situations.

Additionally to the ability to add an order note from the checkout page, WooCommerce also automatically generates notes whenever the order status changes, however, these system generated notes are not visible within the Users Insights profile. This is to help avoid any confusion that may come from an information overload. If you want, you can manually add a note to the order summary. Not only does this help you keep track of past orders and their turnaround times, but it also allows you to quickly check a customer’s experience with your WooCommerce store.

It’s also possible to use the WooCommerce customer notes for customer tracking, as you can add the product, order, shipment and other details in it. Hence you can use the user or order notes to create an order history that is easy to follow.

That’s it! Now you know how to use the Users Insights notes feature to capture and share WooCommerce customer notes. We hope that this article helped you improve your WooCommerce customer management and organization.